In mid-July, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu resigned as president of PEN America, two years after writers boycotted the organisation to protest against its silencing of Palestinian voices and support for the US-Israeli war in Gaza. This isn’t PEN America’s first mutiny. Writers have previously protested against the organisation’s complicity with Islamophobia and US foreign policy, especially amid America’s War on Terror and its associated horrors.

PEN America, a chapter of an international organisation founded in London in 1921, has long struggled to understand the contours of this world, and how it might be different from Washington or New York. Even as astute and courageous a writer as Susan Sontag, when president in 1989, framed the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a simple matter of free expression versus totalitarianism. John Berger, disagreeing with her, argued that this ignored how Rushdie’s book was being funnelled into “a unique 20th-century holy war, with… terrifying righteousness on both sides.”

The end of the Cold War only entrenched PEN America’s righteousness. Its increasingly glitzy Manhattan galas highlighted the organisation’s cozy relationship with wealth and power – a trend that mirrored literary culture at large in the 2000s, when expanding literary festivals created an impression of intellectual vitality while keeping inconvenient truths at bay. Where PEN America stood apart was in its overt alignment with American empire. The organisation has campaigned vigorously for persecuted writers in Russia, China and Iran, while often maintaining judicious silence on US allies.

Mengestu, a PEN America board member, was elected its president in late 2025. He spoke to us about his experience, and his understanding of how PEN America’s selective approach to freedom of expression has run aground in a world at the end of the end of history.

Siddhartha Deb: What made you accept the presidency of PEN America last December, given the boycott over the silencing of Palestinian voices?

Dinaw Mengestu: When the boycott happened, I’d been on the board for close to seven years. Despite certain tensions, I trusted that good intentions underlay most of its work. But PEN’s responses to events in Gaza over the last couple of years have made it clear it was no longer acting ethically. It became a choice: leave, or try to shift the organisation from within.

Within a month of my starting, a PEN team working on US free expression programmes released a statement supporting Guy Hochman, a comedian and former IDF soldier who was accused of inciting genocide in Gaza and calling for a resource blockade. [A comedy club in New York had just cancelled a performance by him in response to protests.] I didn’t see or even know about the statement until friends asked why PEN America was defending a man who celebrated the death and rape of civilians, when this wasn’t even a free-expression issue. The statement was retracted, but that provoked further anger from far-right voices who deny there’s a genocide in Gaza.

When I looked more closely at PEN America’s domestic work over the past decade, I found something more complicated than the bias that was apparent in the international work. There were surface-level commitments masking undercurrents of neglect or bias, which was a pattern that informed its stance on Gaza.

Can you give me an example?

PEN America works in five areas: free speech on campuses, educational gag orders, book banning, disinformation and online harassment. Its campus speech programme published its first report in 2016, one year after the first anti-BDS legislation in the US was passed.

You’re referring to efforts by pro-Palestinian groups advocating for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and against institutions and individuals allied to its programme of discrimination against Palestinians.

Yes. In July 2015, Illinois passed the first anti-BDS law, requiring state pension funds to divest from companies boycotting Israel. That September, Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights published a report called The Palestinian Exception to Free Speech.

I’d never read the report until I began scrutinising PEN America. It documented hundreds of cases of harassment, intimidation and punishment targeting protected speech by faculty and students. Yet in PEN America’s campus speech report, tensions around Israel and Palestine were reduced to a single case study at UCLA. It ignored the growing legislative and administrative threats to pro-Palestinian speech, even as UCLA was moving to adopt a definition of antisemitism that could ban BDS on campus.

There was a kind of performance of objectivity – claiming to defend all speech while ignoring structural realities. It asserted that threats to free expression came equally from both sides. Which wasn’t true; real legislative threats targeted one specific form of speech. The report’s framing treated BDS as an act of violence causing physical and psychological harm to Jewish students, some of whom it named and quoted at length.

Palestinian students received the opposite treatment. The primary Palestinian voice was anonymous, and their quotes were framed in calculated terms, presenting BDS as an economic tool only. Meanwhile, Jewish students were named and humanised, speaking to the emotional harm caused by criticism of Zionism. Across the case study’s seven pages, terminology related to Jewish and Israeli identity appeared over 100 times; “Palestinian” appeared six times, and “Palestine” not once outside the context of Students for Justice in Palestine.

What was PEN America’s relationship with the anti-BDS legislation?

I’ve always viewed the right to boycott as protected under the first amendment. But anti-BDS laws were designed to bypass first-amendment protections. They reframe BDS not as political speech, but economic conduct that is also discriminatory. To prove discrimination, the state needed documented instances of personal harm. How do you show harm? You document the experiences of individuals who claim they have suffered this kind of harm, and you argue that it is persistent and pervasive and interferes with their ability to be a student, which is exactly what PEN America’s case study does.

Looking at the 2016 campus programme, the question arose: What is an organisation devoted to the free expression of writers even doing here?

When did you reach breaking point?

In February, I learned of plans for a new report on the cultural boycott of Israel. That was a rupture, because it became hard for me to believe in the integrity of our work. For 10 years, PEN America did nothing to oppose anti-BDS legislation as it spread across the country. And given that BDS does not target individuals, how could a free-expression organisation publish a report attacking constitutionally protected speech? The bias behind that decision was obvious. And as I saw, it was something the organisation had been doing for years.

Another example: in 2017, PEN America issued a statement ostensibly opposing anti-BDS legislation. But the statement left open the option that the “overbroad” bill could simply be rewritten to pass legal muster.

We saw the same pattern with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. PEN America officially opposed legislating the definition on first-amendment grounds, while advocating for legislation that would lead to states voluntarily adopting it.

That means you’re bypassing courts, legislatures and the Constitution.

It’s insidious. PEN America issued a report and article arguing that legal enforcement of the IHRA definition was flawed because courts would strike it down. Instead, PEN America pointed to a 2024 Maryland bill that mandated antisemitism training for schools without explicitly codifying the IHRA definition. So to whom do you turn to provide resources for such training? In Maryland’s case: the Anti-Defamation League. Guess what happens next? In 2024, soon after the bill passed, the Social Studies Standards Committee at the Maryland State Department of Education adopted the IHRA definition. And then, last year, the sole mention of Palestine or Palestinians – in the term “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” – was struck from Maryland’s social studies curriculums.

Does PEN America function like the Writers’ Union in the Soviet Union – an institution empowered by the state to project a kind of national and moral superiority, but also unable to countenance dissent of any kind?

Yes, and that’s become especially clear to me over these past six months. The main difference from the Soviet model is the veneer of dissent that PEN America maintains for cover. After much pressure, PEN America issued statements on the murders of journalists in Gaza by Israeli forces. But there was no attempt to come up with a systematic understanding of how they were targeted, how to stop that from happening, or how to hold the perpetrators accountable.

PEN America has the resources to create trackers for supposed book bans around the US, cataloguing every random book that is moved off a shelf. But it offers no equivalent effort for what is the single greatest assault on journalists. When challenged, the response is consistently to deny that there is any discrepancy. The organisation points to one report, one document, one sentence in an article and says: ‘Look at what we’ve done.’ When asked about the inadequacy of that response, or the bias in that work, they attack not the merits of that argument, but the individuals making it. This is true internally as well. I’ve received many messages, from especially from junior staff, who are deeply angry and frustrated at being silenced, at being kept in the dark. On more than one occasion, board members stated that staff who are opposed to this kind of bigoted work should either shut up or find someplace else to work. A decision was made, before this year’s report was published, to keep most staff in the dark, even though it would be profoundly disruptive to their work, because the last thing they want is dissent.

You mentioned trying to get more writers on the board. Is the board composed largely of people who are not writers, and is that part of the problem? Or is there a real reluctance on the part of American writers to take up any kind of political position?

At least half of the board are supposed to be writers, but the definition of “writer” has expanded, and their influence on the board has shrunk to the point that some people have even called into question the very idea of PEN America being a writers’ organisation. Writers seemed to be required really only for the festival, for the awards and the gala.

Many writers actively avoid joining the board because of the organisation’s history, and their concern about what impact they might actually be able to have. What if you’re on there and you realise, fuck, it’s just continuing to act unethically, and now you’re on the inside? Where does that leave you?

I had thought of myself as politically engaged, and that I understood certain parts of Africa and their intersections with US foreign policy quite well. But I didn’t. I thought I understood the landscape of free speech in America, but I didn’t. Had I pursued these questions when I stayed on the board past [the boycott in] 2024, I would have understood better what could and couldn’t be fixed. And if I’d been asking them from 2016 onwards, I’d have known even better.

I went in with certain priorities that I thought I would be able to work with. I was aware of issues of real concern in Ethiopia and Eritrea. That, to me, felt important. But it was just a small part of a larger whole. When you look at the larger whole, you see a system that you don’t want to be a part of.

Do those shaping PEN America view it openly as an instrument of US foreign policy, or do they believe they’re defending free speech?

We are all closer to certain experiences than others; what happens in Ethiopia is obviously important to me because of my proximity to the country. But it’s a problem when your proximity means you’re willing to ignore or deny someone else’s humanity to protect what’s close to you. If I believe my right to speak is worth more than yours, I’m fundamentally saying my right to exist and think and act is more valuable than yours. And the fullest expression of that is I get to live and you don’t. That view, which PEN America has put into practice, has to be seen for what it is: racist. And the consequences are profound.

Do we need an alternative to PEN America?

Yes. We need an organisation where writers drive the work, where they’re not decorative elements. Where they’re the source of support for writers who are persecuted or forced to flee, where we work across borders and in translation, where we work not to reflect US foreign interests or our own sources of power, but instead to ensure that writers can use their voices to talk about their world. That’s the only way we can believe in the ability of writers to impact what actually happens at the level of policy and our cultural discourse.

Power and money transformed PEN America. Its budget grew from around $2 million to over $20 million in less than a decade. The money exerts a certain influence. For example, its work on disinformation, funded in part by Meta, led PEN to advocate for platform content moderation policies that disproportionately silenced minority communities.

While groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation warned against automated platform moderation, PEN supported it. Over the years, that system has led to certain kinds of political speech being labeleld as “extremist” or “hateful” and therefore subject to removal, creating exactly the kind of discriminatory suppression that other civic organisations warned against. A study from Utrecht University showed how Meta’s moderation systems led to the systematic removal of thousands of pro-Palestinian posts and pages.

In PEN America’s case, what makes this all the more problematic is that it’s a free expression organisation with a literary background. Its work isn’t objective, however, and in critical areas it’s blatantly discriminatory. Yet we believe that it is acting in good faith, that it’s principled. That assumption is, in part, what has allowed so much of its work to go unchallenged, and why it’s so important now that we look at it honestly and critically for what it is.